Thursday, January 26, 2006

Maybe she has a tapeworm?


Yesterday I felt all proud of myself (in a Martha sort of way) for making loaf cakes to give to our friends. Sadly, I think we all know what pride "goeth" before. In case you missed Sunday school that year, it goeth before the discovery of kitty teeth-marks in your beautiful, tender, cling film-covered vanilla cake.

We adopted Josephine, Devourer of Cakes, from the Medfield Animal Shelter on Thanksgiving, and she's apparently a 25-pound cat trapped in the body of an 8-pound cat. My girl loves to eat! She's batted the spoon out of my hand several times for foods as disparate as spaghettios (don't even question why I was eating spaghettios) and chicken soup, and she goes wild for muffins, cakes, breads, and, as I discovered just now, buttermilk biscuits. She's a fiend for the homemade baked good.

Here's a scary story about Josie: It was midnight when we returned from Christmas with my family, and we saw that Josie's belly was hugely distended. We freaked out a little and called the local vet school's 24-hour emergency line. The vets on the phone told Petunia that Josie "almost certainly has FIP, a serious disease that's always fatal in cats." WHAT? We'd just lost our beloved little kitty Madeleine in September to complications from a routine dental surgery, and now they're saying that Josie's going to die of FIP? Being very Type A, we googled FIP. Here's a tip for you: don't look up FIP if you have a cat in your life. Just don't do it.

After lots of back-and-forth with the vets (during which time they said they couldn't guarantee she'd make it through the night), we discovered that half of the food was gone from Josie's 8-pound food container. We realized that Jo had eaten approximately 4 pounds of food in 3 days. We felt a little better about Josie's FIP diagnosis, and we decided to take her to our own vet in the morning.

The next day our vet weighed her and discovered that Josie was 1 1/2 pounds heavier than usual. She laughed at Josephine's moxie, telling her she needed to let out her belt and not indulge quite so much over the holidays. Most importantly, she reassured me that Jo is in great health. Amazingly, Josie's digestive system compensated for her Iams binge--she never got sick from it, and within 2 days she regained her slim figure.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

My Rudy kitty loves Ritz crackers as I discovered last night. He licked one all around the house for a good hour before he finally chewed most of it and then left crumbs in the carpet. What's not to love?

2:19 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

OK, also, our kitties are even psychic twins. Emily has been such a lunatic about people food lately. The other night we had almost exactly the same cake-eating incident! I made a sheet cake and had it out to cool on the stove and when I went back to check and see if it was ready to frost, there were little kitty nibble marks all over it! (Of course it goes without saying that I of course frosted it and we ate it.) And also, she's very insane about drinks. You can't put a glass down anywhere that she can get to if you want to have a hair free drink. She will stick her big hairy cat face in there to try whatever's in the glass. She's totally loony.

1:30 PM  
Blogger Clementine said...

y'all's comments are killing me! first of all, "anonymous," i remember pre-rudy days when you used to make fun of me for babying my cat. and now your cat is known as "my rudy!" secondly, miss jane, i read your email before reading your comment, and i live for emily's food list. i can't believe she tried diet dr. pepper!

2:07 PM  

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